It’s on: GOP, Democrats fight over women voters

LAURIE KELLMAN

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Is the 2012 elec­tion shap­ing up to be all about women?

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama is work­ing hard to woo this piv­otal con­stituency in his re-election race. His Demo­c­ra­tic allies are even accus­ing the GOP of launch­ing a “war against women” after the Repub­li­cans reignited a new national debate over cul­tural issues, includ­ing birth control.

But now the Repub­li­cans — includ­ing Ann Rom­ney and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski — are strik­ing back with a promise: Their party will win women by focus­ing on the real No. 1 issue, the economy.

Not that Obama is ready to give up that issue.

“I believe that the Democ­rats have a bet­ter story to tell to women about how we’re going to solid­ify the mid­dle class and grow this econ­omy, make sure every­body has a fair shot, everybody’s doing their fair share, and we got a fair set of rules of the road that every­body has to fol­low,” Obama said Tues­day as Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial con­tenders com­peted in Super Tues­day primaries.

Hours later, Rom­ney — the wife of GOP front-runner Mitt Rom­ney — answered him.

“Do you know what women care about? Women care about jobs,” she declared on national tele­vi­sion, as her hus­band waited nearby to speak. “They’re angry, and they’re furi­ous about the enti­tle­ment debt that we’re leav­ing for our children.”

“I’m right along with Ann Rom­ney,” Murkowski said on Wednes­day. The Alaska Repub­li­can has been crit­i­cal of her party’s focus on birth con­trol pol­icy when peo­ple remain wor­ried about eco­nomic sta­bil­ity. In a tele­phone inter­view, Murkowski added: “There is clearly a direc­tion that we can take as Repub­li­cans that gives con­fi­dence and assur­ance that we are focused on the issues that mat­ter to women.”

Eight months before Elec­tion Day, women have become arguably the most sought-after vot­ing group in an elec­tion year where the pres­i­dency and con­trol of Con­gress are at stake. Females com­prise a major­ity of vot­ers in a typ­i­cal pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year.

Women are a cru­cial vot­ing group for Obama, par­tic­u­larly in the sub­urbs of big cities like Den­ver and Detroit. He would not be pres­i­dent today had he not beaten Repub­li­can John McCain by 13 points among women four years ago. The impor­tance of win­ning the women’s vote may be mag­ni­fied this year given that the frag­ile econ­omy may weigh down the sup­port of other groups that sup­ported Obama strongly in 2008, such as Lati­nos and college-age voters.

Recent polling sug­gests Obama is gain­ing among women. An Asso­ci­ated Press-GfK poll con­ducted last month showed his approval rat­ing had risen 10 per­cent­age points among women since Decem­ber. The poll also showed that women approve more strongly of the way the pres­i­dent is han­dling the economy.

For Repub­li­cans, con­ser­v­a­tive women rep­re­sent a loyal sec­tor of the party’s base, and female inde­pen­dents offer an oppor­tu­nity to eat into Obama’s sup­port. Inde­pen­dent women broke for Obama by a 10-point mar­gin four years ago, accord­ing to exit polling, while among inde­pen­dent men he man­aged just a 5-point edge.

Both par­ties have viewed the furor over Obama’s pol­icy on access to con­tra­cep­tion as an oppor­tu­nity to curry favor with women. Repub­li­cans protested Obama’s man­date that birth con­trol be cov­ered by insur­ance, even for employ­ers whose faiths for­bid con­tra­cep­tion. The pol­icy, Repub­li­cans insisted, was a vio­la­tion of the Constitution’s guar­an­tee of reli­gious free­dom, and they forced a vote on it in the Sen­ate. The GOP mea­sure to over­turn Obama’s pol­icy lost, 51–48, with one Repub­li­can, Sen. Olympia Snowe, help­ing Democ­rats kill it.

Recent exit polls in the GOP nom­i­na­tion con­test sug­gest some groups of women within the GOP are turned off by the focus on social issues. In Ohio, for exam­ple, mar­ried women broke for San­to­rum, while unmar­ried women favored Rom­ney, a mar­riage gap that did not exist among men. Women who said abor­tion should be legal in most or all cases broke for Rom­ney, those who thought it should be ille­gal in most or all cases leaned Santorum.

Democ­rats called the Sen­ate vote the lat­est attempt to roll back long-established women’s rights. House Repub­li­cans, they also pointed out, had barred a young law stu­dent from tes­ti­fy­ing in favor of Obama’s pol­icy but allowed five men to tes­tify against it. And then radio talk show host Rush Lim­baugh called the woman a “slut” and a “pros­ti­tute” for argu­ing that her school, George­town Uni­ver­sity, should cover her contraception.

Obama made sure reporters knew he had tele­phoned the young woman, San­dra Fluke, to offer sup­port. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, called Limbaugh’s remarks “inap­pro­pri­ate.” And Lim­baugh, los­ing adver­tis­ers, apologized.

The Democ­rats’ pitch — that Repub­li­cans were launch­ing a “war on women” was born. Coast to coast, Democ­rats hawked the theme. Women sen­a­tors used it to raise money, wives of can­di­dates included it in pleas for sup­port, and sur­ro­gates — from Sen. Claire McCaskill’s mother to for­mer ten­nis star Bil­lie Jean King — ran with it.

“Stop the GOP’s War on Women!” read an email sent to Democ­rats by the party’s House cam­paign committee.

The drum­beat has frus­trated Repub­li­cans, pushed onto the defen­sive as polls showed a major­ity of Amer­i­cans favored the president’s con­tra­cep­tion policy.

But the notion that Repub­li­cans are out to strip women of their rights “is just a lie,” said Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee Chair­man Reince Priebus. “It’s not a war on women. It’s an effort to pro­tect reli­gious liberty.”

But Ann Romney’s rebut­tal moves the response fur­ther, said vet­eran GOP poll­ster Ed Goeas.

Polling, he said, shows that dif­fer­ent sub­groups of women assess eco­nomic ques­tions dif­fer­ently — and that white women in par­tic­u­lar respond well to the Repub­li­cans’ eco­nomic message.

“Everybody’s respond­ing to this as if women vote as a mono­lith,” Goeas said. “They don’t.”

Or, sug­gested Murkowski, they shouldn’t.

In the inter­view, she said she regrets her vote for the GOP amend­ment to over­turn Obama’s con­tra­cep­tion pol­icy. If she had it to do over again, she would join Snowe in vot­ing against it.

“Women in Alaska are wor­ried about what they’re pay­ing for energy costs. They’re wor­ried about whether or not they’re going to be able to put their kids through col­lege, whether their sav­ings are secure,” Murkowski said.

Even Obama acknowl­edged that female vot­ers are going to want ques­tions answered on the economy.

“I’m not some­body who believes that women are going to be single-issue vot­ers. They never have been,” he said.

Posted by AP News on Mar 7 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.